How the Republican party can rebuild — in 4 not-so-easy stepsby Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake

One week ago, the voting public roundly rejected Republicans at the presidential and Senate level and, while the party kept control of the House, it did so while winning fewer overall votes than Democrats.

Most GOP strategists and politicians acknowledge that the 2012 election amounted to a moment of reckoning for the party — a time when Republicans finally came face to face with the demographic realities and base problems that badly jeopardize its future as a national majority party.

(There are some who argue that, had a few hundred thousand votes in Virginia, Florida and Ohio switched sides, then Mitt Romney would have been president and the talk of the necessity of overhauling the Republican brand would be nonexistent. Maybe. But that’s like saying that if the Washington Nationals had held on to their six-run lead over the St. Louis Cardinals they might have been World Series champs. They didn’t, and they aren’t.)

Less clear is what the party needs to do in order to reverse a slide — particularly at the presidential level — that has been in progress since the 2006 midterm elections. We put the question of how the party begins to rebuild to a handful of smart GOP operatives and aggregated their four best thoughts below.

One other point before we get to it: Several strategists pointed to the Republican Governors Association annual meeting later this week in Las Vegas as the semi-official kickoff of that rebranding. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — two of the party’s brighter stars – will be chosen as co-chairs of the RGA at that meeting.

And away we go! Here’s how to begin the reconstruction of the Republican party in four not-so-easy steps.

1. Stop running against things and start running for things: “We have entirely defined ourselves over the last several years as the ‘not Obama’ party,” said Todd Harris, a veteran Republican consultant. “At the same time, few GOP candidates have given people any positive rationale to vote Republican, beyond that we’re against Obama.”

The 2010 midterm election — seen through Harris’s lens — proved to be a bit of fool’s gold for Republicans. After the whitewash election of 2006 and 2008, Republicans were on the verge of this reckoning in early 2009. But Obama’s decision to push the economic stimulus, followed by the health care law, united Republicans around a common enemy. And the gains they made in 2010 affirmed that strategy for some of them.

Running simply as the “other guy” in a midterm election is very different than running to oust an incumbent in a presidential year, however. Voters expect some sort of positive vision from a party in a presidential year. They didn’t get it in 2012 from Mitt Romney or the Republican Party more generally.

“We need to rethink our public policy,” said one veteran GOP consultant granted anonymity to offer his candid assessment of the state of the party. “It seems that no matter what the problem is, the solution is a tax cut. That ain’t gonna cut it on many issues.”

2. Find a way into the Hispanic community: Perhaps the most daunting demographic data point coming out of the 2012 election was that Romney lost Hispanic voters nationwide by 44(!) points. Given the rapid growth of the Latino population — and the relative youth of that community — there are increasingly few paths to the presidency for Republicans unless they can reverse the party’s downward spiral among Hispanics. (John McCain got 30 percent of the Latino vote in 2008, while George W. Bush won 44 percent in 2004 — though some have suggested the latter number skewed high.)

“We have to stop closing the door on Hispanic voters,” said Republican pollster Glen Bolger. “Without them, we can’t win another national election.” Harris pointed out that 50,000 Hispanic teenagers turn 18 (voting age) every month; “That means that every two months there are enough potential new Hispanic voters to make up Romney’s losing margin in Ohio,” he added.

What Republicans can do — from a policy perspective — to convince Hispanics that they are on their side is a bit murkier, although every Republican strategist we talked to insisted that the party needs to cut a deal on immigration reform — a move that would allow a values conversation to happen. And that’s a conversation GOPers believe they can win.

3. Innovate on voter contact: The 2012 election proved that the Obama campaign’s neighbor-to-neighbor grassroots targeting and mobilization approach was vastly superior to the more traditional GOP turnout operation, which relies heavily on a series of automated phone calls to voters. (The failure of the Romney campaign’s ORCA program simply highlighted the huge gap between Democrats and Republicans in terms of ground operation.)

“How do you spend a billion [dollars] and get less voters to the poll than 2008,” asked Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican party chairman and one-time candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. Added Steven Law, head of American Crossroads, a leading conservative outside organization: “The Obama campaign has lengthened the Democrats’ lead over Republicans on modern list-building, connecting voter list development to social media engagement and online fundraising in powerful new ways.”

4. Vet and select candidates in a more rigorous manner: The last two elections at the Senate level have exposed the problem with nominating the wrong person. In Nevada, Delaware and Colorado in 2010 and Indiana and Missouri in 2012, Senate Republicans got the least electable general election candidate out of the primary process and watched as five very winnable races were lost.

“We need to allow the party to do everything it can to stop sure losers from winning primaries,” said Bolger. Law echoed that sentiment: “The one consistent refrain I’m hearing is the need to dramatically improve candidate quality, especially in the Senate. Republicans have an almost insurmountable hill to climb to retake the Senate in 2014, but they won’t even get close unless we do a much better job of recruiting, vetting and selecting candidates.”

That is, of course, easier said than done. In 2010, the National Republican Senatorial Committee tried to get involved in primaries for what who it believed to be the most electable candidates (Charlie Crist in Florida, Mike Castle in Delaware) only to see their support trigger a revolt in the conservative base. In 2012, the NRSC took a hands off approach — and that didn’t work either.

It remains to be seen whether the party establishment retains anything in its campaign toolkit that allows it to pick its preferred candidate and push them to victory.

Republicans don’t want Mitt Romney to go away mad but they do, it seems, want him to go away.

That sentiment was in full bloom following Romney’s first post-election comments — made on a phone call with donors earlier this week. On the call, Romney attributed his loss to the “gifts” President Obama’s campaign doled out to young people and minorities. For many, the comments had an eerie echo of the secretly taped “47 percent” remarks Romney made at a May fundraiser.

“There is no Romney wing in the party that he needs to address,” said Ed Rogers, a longtime Republican strategist. “He never developed an emotional foothold within the GOP so he can exit the stage anytime and no one will mourn.”

Added Chris LaCivita, a senior party operative: “The comment just reinforced a perception — fairly or not – that Romney, and by default, the GOP are the party of the ‘exclusives’. It’s time for us to move on and focus on the future leaders within the GOP.”

Speaking of those future leaders, several of the candidates talked about as 2016 presidential possibilities quickly condemned Romney’s comments as well.

“We have got to stop dividing American voters,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. “I absolutely reject that notion, that description … We’re fighting for 100 percent of the vote.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker added that the Republican party isn’t “just for people who are currently not dependent on the government.”

The strong intraparty reaction — just nine days after Romney lost the presidential race — speaks to the desire within the professional political ranks of the Republican party to move on as quickly as possible from an election that badly exposed their weaknesses.

The prevailing opinion among that group is that there is much work to be done and that Romney will have a hand in almost none of it. Put more simply: Thanks for playing. Now go away.

Romney, of course, likely doesn’t share that opinion — still reeling from an election that he quite clearly expected to win but, well, didn’t. (And didn’t even really come close to winning.)

What Romney seems most interested in doing at this point is rehashing why he didn’t win — with an emphasis (at least in his comments to donors) on what was wrong with voters, not what was wrong with his campaign.

That MO, while understandable for someone who has spent the last six-plus years of his life running for president, is tremendously problematic for a party that needs to get away from the stereotype that it is of, by and for white, affluent men even at a time of growing diversity in the country and the electorate.

“The recent comments about what happened in the election are 100 percent wrong,” said Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “The 47 percent comments represent both a fundamental misunderstanding of the country, they offer a constricted vision of the Republican party and the potency of a big tent conservative message."

Former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis was even more blunt: “It shows a huge misreading of the electoral landscape. A rather elitist misread. Where does he think his votes came from in rural America?”

Also worth noting: The White House was quick to jump on Romney’s remarks. “That view of the American people of the electorate and of the election is at odds with the truth of what happened last week,” Carney said Thursday morning.

Here’s the two-pronged problem for Republicans at the moment: 1) Romney has no motivation to toe the party line now, and refrain from making such comments, given that he will never again be a candidate, and 2) even if Romney quietly steps aside now, the party is left without any sort of elder statesman to help broker future policy and political fights.

To the latter point: While Democrats have Bill Clinton as their triager-in-chief, using his gravitas to help extend and articulate the Democratic brand, George W. Bush seems perfectly content to spend the rest of his days outside of the public spotlight in Texas. And, while John McCain remains an active force in the Senate, he was never someone that Republicans truly saw as one of their own. Now, in Republicans’ best case scenario, Romney is headed to that same path of obscurity.

You guys are hilarious, you buy into the shit about romney argue for him till your blue in the face then buy into the bullshit against him once it's convenient. You are a group of fucking retards, Fox has admitted liars, false polls and had anchors magically switch positions after the election. It is a reflection of the idiots they pander to.

You guys are hilarious, you buy into the shit about romney argue for him till your blue in the face then buy into the bullshit against him once it's convenient. You are a group of fucking retards, Fox has admitted liars, false polls and had anchors magically switch positions after the election. It is a reflection of the idiots they pander to.

Romney Blames Loss on Obama’s ‘Gifts’ to Minorities and Young VotersBy ASHLEY PARKER

Saying that he and his team still felt “troubled” by his loss to President Obama, Mitt Romney on Wednesday attributed his defeat in part to what he called big policy “gifts” that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

In a conference call with fund-raisers and donors to his campaign, Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the “old playbook” of using targeted initiatives to woo specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

“In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said, contrasting Mr. Obama’s strategy to his own of “talking about big issues for the whole country: military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth.”

Mr. Romney’s comments in the 20-minute conference call came after his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, told WISC-TV in Madison on Monday that their loss was a result of Mr. Obama’s strength in “urban areas,” an analysis that did not account for Mr. Obama’s victories in more rural states like Iowa and New Hampshire or the decrease in the number of votes for the president relative to 2008 in critical urban counties in Ohio.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” Mr. Romney said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

The president’s health care plan, he said, was also a useful tool in mobilizing black and Hispanic voters. Though Mr. Romney won the white vote with 59 percent, according to exit polls, minorities coalesced around the president in overwhelming numbers: 93 percent of blacks and 71 percent of Hispanics.

“You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge,” Mr. Romney said. “Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

Nationwide, Mr. Obama won a slightly smaller share of 18- to 29-year-old voters than he did in 2008, according to exit polls, though he increased his share in battleground states like Florida, Ohio and Virginia. Exit polls showed little appreciable difference between Mr. Obama’s performance among black voters nationwide and in many swing states in this election and in 2008. Among Hispanic voters nationwide, Mr. Obama won a greater share in 2012 than in 2008, but perhaps more important, he succeeded in increasing the share of Hispanic voters among the total voting population in key states, including Colorado and Nevada, exit polls showed.

During the call, Mr. Romney was by turns disappointed and pragmatic, expressing his frustration at the outcome on Election Day. A person who was on the call, which included hundreds of participants, let The New York Times listen in.

“I’m very sorry that we didn’t win,” Mr. Romney said on the call. “I know that you expected to win, we expected to win, we were disappointed with the result, we hadn’t anticipated it, and it was very close, but close doesn’t count in this business.”

He continued: “And so now we’re looking and saying, ‘O.K., what can we do going forward?’ But frankly, we’re still so troubled by the past, it’s hard to put together our plans for the future.”

He added that he was hoping to find a way for the close-knit group, which excelled in fund-raising but was ultimately unable to propel him into the Oval Office, “to stay connected so that we can stay informed and have influence on the direction of the party, and perhaps the selection of a future nominee, which, by the way, will not be me.” (He suggested an annual meeting, as well as a monthly newsletter.)

In a news conference of his own Wednesday, Mr. Obama, asked if he still planned to meet with Mr. Romney for a postelection discussion, spoke positively of his former opponent, saying that he “did a terrific job of running the Olympics,” and that he appreciated Mr. Romney’s ideas on government efficiency.

“I’m not either prejudging what he’s interested in doing, nor am I suggesting I’ve got some specific assignment,” the president said, when asked about Mr. Romney. “But what I want to do is to get ideas from him and see if there are some ways that we can potentially work together.”

Romney Blames Loss on Obama’s ‘Gifts’ to Minorities and Young VotersBy ASHLEY PARKER

Saying that he and his team still felt “troubled” by his loss to President Obama, Mitt Romney on Wednesday attributed his defeat in part to what he called big policy “gifts” that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

In a conference call with fund-raisers and donors to his campaign, Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the “old playbook” of using targeted initiatives to woo specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

“In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said, contrasting Mr. Obama’s strategy to his own of “talking about big issues for the whole country: military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth.”

Mr. Romney’s comments in the 20-minute conference call came after his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, told WISC-TV in Madison on Monday that their loss was a result of Mr. Obama’s strength in “urban areas,” an analysis that did not account for Mr. Obama’s victories in more rural states like Iowa and New Hampshire or the decrease in the number of votes for the president relative to 2008 in critical urban counties in Ohio.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” Mr. Romney said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

The president’s health care plan, he said, was also a useful tool in mobilizing black and Hispanic voters. Though Mr. Romney won the white vote with 59 percent, according to exit polls, minorities coalesced around the president in overwhelming numbers: 93 percent of blacks and 71 percent of Hispanics.

“You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge,” Mr. Romney said. “Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

Nationwide, Mr. Obama won a slightly smaller share of 18- to 29-year-old voters than he did in 2008, according to exit polls, though he increased his share in battleground states like Florida, Ohio and Virginia. Exit polls showed little appreciable difference between Mr. Obama’s performance among black voters nationwide and in many swing states in this election and in 2008. Among Hispanic voters nationwide, Mr. Obama won a greater share in 2012 than in 2008, but perhaps more important, he succeeded in increasing the share of Hispanic voters among the total voting population in key states, including Colorado and Nevada, exit polls showed.

During the call, Mr. Romney was by turns disappointed and pragmatic, expressing his frustration at the outcome on Election Day. A person who was on the call, which included hundreds of participants, let The New York Times listen in.

“I’m very sorry that we didn’t win,” Mr. Romney said on the call. “I know that you expected to win, we expected to win, we were disappointed with the result, we hadn’t anticipated it, and it was very close, but close doesn’t count in this business.”

He continued: “And so now we’re looking and saying, ‘O.K., what can we do going forward?’ But frankly, we’re still so troubled by the past, it’s hard to put together our plans for the future.”

He added that he was hoping to find a way for the close-knit group, which excelled in fund-raising but was ultimately unable to propel him into the Oval Office, “to stay connected so that we can stay informed and have influence on the direction of the party, and perhaps the selection of a future nominee, which, by the way, will not be me.” (He suggested an annual meeting, as well as a monthly newsletter.)

In a news conference of his own Wednesday, Mr. Obama, asked if he still planned to meet with Mr. Romney for a postelection discussion, spoke positively of his former opponent, saying that he “did a terrific job of running the Olympics,” and that he appreciated Mr. Romney’s ideas on government efficiency.

“I’m not either prejudging what he’s interested in doing, nor am I suggesting I’ve got some specific assignment,” the president said, when asked about Mr. Romney. “But what I want to do is to get ideas from him and see if there are some ways that we can potentially work together.”

I ran a bad campaign, that's the major reason for his loss.

But don't think for a second that Obama wasn't pandering with his executive orders and attacks on AZ.

From the 47% to ‘gifts’: Mitt Romney’s ugly vision of politicsPosted by Ezra Klein

During the campaign, Mitt Romney repeatedly promised seniors that he’d restore President Obama’s $716 billion in Medicare cuts. He promised them that, unlike Obama, he wouldn’t permit a single change to Medicare or Social Security for 10 years. He promised them, in other words, political immunity. While the rest of the country was trying to pay down the deficit and prioritize spending, they’d be safe.

He also promised the rich that they’d see a lower overall tax rate, and while he did say he would try to pay for some of those tax cuts by closing loopholes and deductions, he also said he expected faster growth would pay for those cuts — which means he really was promising tax cuts to the rich at a time when he said deficit reduction should be a top priority. Oh, and let’s not forget his oft-stated intention to roll back the Dodd-Frank financial reforms and replace them with…something.

Keep all that in mind when you hear Romney blaming his loss on “the gifts” that Obama reportedly handed out to “the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.” Romney was free with the gifts, too, and his promises to seniors and to the rich carried a far higher price tag than any policies Obama promised minorities or the young.

But to Romney, and perhaps to the donors he was speaking to, those policies didn’t count as “gifts.” They were…something else. Good ideas, maybe. Or the fulfillment of past promises. Or perhaps it wasn’t the policies that were different, but the people they were being promised to.

The last time Romney’s comments to his donors leaked, he was telling them about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay taxes, refuse to take responsibility for their lives, and will support Obama come hell or high water. These new comments are continuous with those: Romney really does appear to believe that there’s a significant portion of the electorate that’s basically comprised of moochers.

That’s Romney’s political cosmology: The Democrats bribe the moochers with health care and green cards. The Republicans try to free the makers through tax cuts and deregulation. Politics isn’t a conflict between two reasonable perspectives on how to best encourage growth and high-living standards. It’s a kind of reverse-Marxist clash between those who produce and those who take, and the easiest way to tell one from the other is to see who they vote for.

When Romney thinks he’s behind closed doors and he’s just telling other people like him how politics really works, the picture he paints is so ugly as to be bordering on dystopic. It’s not just about class, but about worth, and legitimacy. His voters are worth something to the economy — they’re producers — and they respond to legitimate appeals about how to best manage the country. The Democrats’ voters are drags on the economy — moochers — and they respond to crass pay-offs.

Romney doesn’t voice these opinions in public. He knows better. But so did the voters. That’s what you see in the overwhelming rejection Romney suffered among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and young voters. They sensed that Romney fundamentally didn’t respect them and their role in the economy, and they were right.

You guys are hilarious, you buy into the shit about romney argue for him till your blue in the face then buy into the bullshit against him once it's convenient. You are a group of fucking retards, Fox has admitted liars, false polls and had anchors magically switch positions after the election. It is a reflection of the idiots they pander to.

LAS VEGAS — Republican leaders have begun reckoning with the fact that their party has grown increasingly out of step with a broad majority of American voters.

While party leaders remain confident in their beliefs, they have identified a litany of problems and a steep set of challenges: flawed candidates, a problematic message, the alienation of nonwhite Americans who account for a growing share of the population, outdated technology and a political operation that is not up to that of the Democrats.

A telling sign of their determination to change course was their swift denunciation of the latest tone-deaf comments by Mitt Romney, who little more than a week ago they were all trying to help elect president.

In a conference call with campaign donors on Wednesday, Romney blamed his loss in part on “gifts” that a “very generous” President Obama had given to African Americans, Hispanics and young people. It was similar in sentiment to his earlier suggestion — also to a group of wealthy contributors — that 47 percent of the American public consists of government-dependent deadbeats who view themselves as victims.

“We need to stop being a dumb party, and that means more than stop making dumb comments,” added Jindal, the RGA’s incoming chairman and a rising star in the party.

The need to reorient and rebuild the party was a major topic of conversation at the governors’ meeting. Among the top concerns was the party’s failure to attract Hispanics, the fact that its voter turnout operation did not live up to expectations, its flatfooted response to Obama’s attacks on Romney and its misplaced optimism that Romney would win.

At one session, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour laid out the need to take an ungentle approach to fixing those problems: “We’ve got to give our political organization a very serious proctology exam. We need to look everywhere.”

Jindal and other governors insisted that putting the party back on track does not mean betraying its traditional principles.

“In the face of the losses, we do have to make changes,” Jindal said. “We need to modernize our party. We don’t need to moderate our party.”

Added Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who survived a recall effort earlier this year: “It’s not that our beliefs are wrong. We’re not doing an effective enough job articulating those beliefs.”

He also was critical of Romney’s comments. “We’re the party that helps people find a pathway to live the American dream,” Walker said. “They want to have a chance to live the American dream. They want to have a job.”

Just two years ago, fueled by the insurgent forces of the tea party movement, Republicans took back the House in a midterm election that was viewed as a repudiation of Obama. But the president’s relatively easy victory last week suggests that the gains of 2010 masked deeper problems for the GOP.

Still, Republicans see reason for optimism, particularly at the state level. In January, the number of GOP governors will reach 30 — the highest number either party has claimed in a dozen years.

Some of them are considered to be among the Republicans’ brightest prospects for the 2016 presidential election — a topic that was much discussed outside the formal sessions of the meeting, which was held at the luxurious Wynn Encore casino and resort and attended by a large contingent of lobbyists.

Among the attendees was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, on his first trip outside his home state since it was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. As he made his way through the halls, Christie was frequently stopped by well-wishers and congratulated on his performance following the storm.

Back-to-back presidential losses have often forced political parties to look for a new path.

After losing in 1984 and 1988, for instance, the Democrats moved away from their traditional New Deal liberalism and turned to the “third way” centrism advocated and embodied by then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

GOP governors are well positioned to lead a similar movement now, said Craig Shirley, a biographer of Ronald Reagan who advises conservative groups. “They’re going to know sooner than the people in Washington what is politically feasible and viable.”

Added Pat McCrory, who last week was elected North Carolina’s first GOP governor in 24 years: “Politically, I think the power and influence of the Republican Party is at the state and local level. Governors, I think, are going to have more influence on national policy than the White House or Congress.”

As recently as the 2000 election, Republican governors united early around then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and played an important role in easing his path to the nomination.

“He was one of us, and he was able to get a lot of governors on board early,” recalled Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad.

But Branstad said he was not certain whether Republican governors would form such a phalanx leading up to 2016.

“At this point, people are just trying to analyze what happened” in the most recent election, he said.

While some defeated presidential candidates remain influential figures in their parties, Republicans appear ready to treat Romney as a dinner guest who has stayed too long after coffee.

“There is no Romney wing in the party that he needs to address,” said Ed Rogers, a longtime Republican strategist. “He never developed an emotional foothold within the GOP, so he can exit the stage anytime and no one will mourn.”

WASHINGTON — As Representative Paul D. Ryan casts about to find an explanation for the defeat of the Republican presidential ticket, on which he was Mitt Romney’s running mate, he is looking to the nation’s big cities for answers.

“The surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview with WISC-TV back home in Wisconsin on Monday before returning Tuesday to Capitol Hill for the start of the lame-duck session.

“When we watched Virginia and Ohio coming in,” Mr. Ryan said, “and those ones coming in as tight as they were and looking like we were going to lose them, that’s when it became clear we weren’t going to win.”

Mr. Ryan, now a potential 2016 presidential candidate, has repeated the sentiment in subsequent interviews. And he is not the only conservative who has embraced the notion that a surge of voters in urban America gave Mr. Obama the prize, as many Republicans try to come to grips with how an election they believed was theirs for the taking instead got away.

But his voice carries new weight as he returns to Congress with a larger responsibility to help lead his party back to the White House in the years ahead. Mr. Ryan’s blunt assessment of the failures of his ticket are sure to shape the party’s political future even as he returns to the immediate business of the fight over spending and taxes.

Mr. Ryan’s concerns follow on the heels of other Republicans who argue that the party’s lack of appeal to minority voters — many of whom live in the nation’s largest urban centers — has made it more difficult to win the presidency.

There is some anecdotal evidence to back up the analysis that Mr. Obama was helped by his appeal in the nation’s population centers. In Philadelphia and Ohio, for example, local news reports have documented dozens of city precincts where Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan failed to get a single vote. And in Ohio, turnout among blacks, many of whom live in urban areas, increased significantly over 2008.

In the nation’s largest cities, exit poll data show that the president won overwhelmingly, earning almost 7 out of every 10 votes. In some states, like Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama did even better in the big cities, winning 85 percent of the vote. Mr. Romney won the nation’s suburbs by a narrow margin.

But pointing to urban voters for the Republican failure to win last week does not take into account that the Republican ticket also lost big in some rural, mostly white states, like Iowa and New Hampshire.

And there is little proof from the results of the election that urban turnout over all played the decisive role in swing states like Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia or Wisconsin, where Mitt Romney lost in Mr. Ryan’s suburban home district.

“What Paul Ryan misses is that the Republicans have been losing the urban vote for a long, long time,” said Marc Morial, the president and chief executive of the National Urban League. “Now they are losing the suburban vote, too. They are becoming more urban in their character, in their makeup, in the problems.”

In Ohio, for example, Mr. Obama received 63,000 fewer votes in the three big urban counties in 2012 than he did in 2008. In the big urban counties in Virginia, Colorado, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama also won by smaller margins than in 2008, typically receiving fewer votes. In Milwaukee, voter turnout did increase, but the Romney/Ryan ticket picked up more than half of the increased number of voters there.

Mr. Morial said he did not know why Mr. Ryan was focusing attention on the nation’s urban core as the cause of the Republican losses. But he said the decision by Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan not to attend his group’s annual conference was not a good sign that Mr. Ryan wants more outreach in the future.

“Certainly those types of comments do not suggest that those who lost last Tuesday are interested in an open dialogue about the challenges that our communities face,” Mr. Morial said.

Democrats say that Mr. Ryan’s remarks mask the larger issues behind the loss, and represent an inability to grasp other factors behind it.

“In our state, urban voters had two good reasons to come out,” said Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania. “One was to support the president, and the other was the state had tried to implement voter ID laws. But assigning one factor to the case of an electoral defeat is usually pretty dangerous.”

Representative Michael M. Honda, Democrat of California, said that “urban” is “just another code word for people of color.”

“But a lot of people of color live in the countryside, too,” he added. “He is just grabbing at straws to justify his loss.”

In an interview broadcast Tuesday with ABC News, Mr. Ryan said he did not think that the nation’s voters had given Mr. Obama a mandate to raise taxes on the wealthy.

“I don’t think so, because they also re-elected the House Republicans,” Mr. Ryan said. “So whether people intended or not, we’ve got divided government. This is a very close election, and unfortunately divided government didn’t work very well the last two years. We’re going to have to make sure it works in the next two years.”

Some of Mr. Ryan’s aides said that as a candidate he had hoped to spend more time in poor urban areas to explain his theories of fighting poverty, and was restrained by his schedule. He gave an antipoverty speech in Cleveland, one of a handful of such events.

Not all his colleagues agree with Mr. Ryan’s analysis, arguing that the party needs to focus on reaching a broader coalition.

“We lost many demographic groups,” said Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina. “The issue to me is why. I don’t think we are one comprehensive immigration bill away from winning Hispanic voters, any more than we are one marginal rate increase from economic nirvana.”

At Republican governors' gathering, plenty of blame for RomneyThe conference is the first meeting of party leaders since the election, and there's ample discussion of what went wrong.By Michael A. Memoli, Washington Bureau

LAS VEGAS — A week's worth of soul-searching among Republicans has yielded no shortage of explanations for the party's failure to win the White House. They point to the Obama campaign's early and aggressive effort to disparage Mitt Romney. They admit Democrats had a superior voter-turnout operation. Some point to Superstorm Sandy, saying it robbed Romney of momentum.

What they won't say is that President Obama won a mandate for his vision, or that the GOP has veered too far right in its outlook.

"The president won the election. But I think it wasn't on the issues," Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad said Thursday at the annual Republican Governors Assn. conference. "He ran a heck of a good grass-roots organization and was able to basically convince enough people that they couldn't trust Gov. Romney."

The meeting of Republican governors and governors-elect here, which also attracted party strategists, donors and lobbyists, is the largest gathering of GOP leaders since the election. And few were shy about laying much of the blame squarely at the feet of the former Massachusetts governor, who was once the group's chairman.

"The fatal flaw with this presidential election, more than anything, wasn't just the last few weeks. It was early this summer, after an extended and lengthy and onerous primary season, the president's campaign did an effective job at branding Mitt Romney before he fully had a chance to identify himself to the people of this country," said Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who in June defeated a recall effort by Democrats and labor. "We didn't have a well-defined case against the president and, of even greater importance, we didn't have an effective means by which to counter the attacks."

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, the group's incoming chairman, pointedly criticized Romney for continuing to advance the idea, most recently in a Wednesday conference call with donors, that Obama owed his victory to "gifts" his administration had doled out to key demographic groups.

"We have got to stop dividing the American voters. We need to go after 100% of the votes, not 53%," Jindal said, in a reference to Romney's videotaped comments from earlier in the year that the 47% of Americans who don't pay taxes see themselves as victims. "I think that's absolutely wrong. I don't think that represents where we are as a party and where we are going as a party."

Jindal and others offered the GOP's governors as a model for how the party can succeed "without abandoning our principles." Although the party lost Senate and House seats, as well as the White House, it won a gubernatorial post in North Carolina, a Democratic seat for 24 years, while also holding onto its other seats.

Walker noted that he won his recall campaign by a larger margin than his 2010 election.

"So for those who look at the presidential election and are somewhat upset, remember that in probably the clearest-choice election in a gubernatorial election, we came out on the right side of things, and it was largely because we defined it in the clearest of terms," he said.

Democrats point out that they won seven of the 11 gubernatorial races, including three of the hardest-fought ones — in New Hampshire, Montana and Washington. The GOP failed to win a single state that Obama carried, while Democrats also triumphed in Romney states, such as Missouri and West Virginia.

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, in typically colorful terms, said the party's establishment needed "a very serious proctology exam" to find out why its use of technology and its efforts to get out the vote had fallen so short.

Barbour also said the party needed to make a stronger effort to court minority voters and that there was an urgent need for immigration reform. "We can catch up in four years," he said. "This isn't rocket science. But it is hard work, and we can't wait and start in 2016."

The Republican National Committee is conducting its own self-examination. An initial review notes how close the party came to unseating Obama. A swing of a combined 333,000 votes in four states would have handed Romney the presidency, the document states.

And diverging from the assumption held by Republicans that undecided voters would break in favor of the challenger, it was Obama who held a 5-percentage-point advantage among those who made up their minds in the final few days of the campaign, and a 7-percentage-point edge among those who decided on the final day.

It is that latter statistic, from exit polls, that prompted several here to speculate that Superstorm Sandy blunted Romney's campaign. Pollster Glen Bolger noted that a swing of just 3 percentage points in some states could have swayed the outcome.

"Any day in a campaign that wasn't about the economy or jobs was a good day for Obama," Barbour said. Seated just feet away was Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was criticized by some for praising Obama's handling of the storm in its immediate aftermath, just a week shy of the presidential vote.

The next test of the party will come next year in races for governor's offices in New Jersey and Virginia, both held by Republicans. But in those races a historical quirk may be on their side — since 1989, the party that won the White House has lost the governorship in those off-year states.

You guys are hilarious, you buy into the shit about romney argue for him till your blue in the face then buy into the bullshit against him once it's convenient. You are a group of fucking retards, Fox has admitted liars, false polls and had anchors magically switch positions after the election. It is a reflection of the idiots they pander to.

Ten days after failing to sail into the White House, Mitt Romney is already being tossed overboard by his party.

The former Massachusetts governor — who attracted $1 billion in funding and 59 million votes in his bid to unseat President Obama — has rapidly become persona non grata to a shellshocked Republican Party, which appears eager to map out its future without its 2012 nominee.

Romney was by all accounts stunned at the scale of his Nov. 6 loss, dropping quickly from public view after delivering a short concession speech to a half-empty Boston arena. Then came a series of tin-eared remarks this week blaming his loss on Obama’s “gifts” to African Americans and Hispanics, among others — putting him squarely at odds with party leaders struggling to build bridges with minorities.

“You can’t expect to be a leader of all the people and be divisive,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Friday on MSNBC, adding: “Someone asked me, ‘Why did Mitt Romney lose?’ And I said, ‘Because he got less votes than Barack Obama, that’s why.’ ”

It’s a remarkable fall from grace for Romney, who just 10 days ago held the chance of a Republican return to power at the White House.

The messy aftermath of his failure suggests that Romney, a political amalgam with no natural constituency beyond the business community, is unlikely to play a significant role in rebuilding his party, many Republicans said this week.

“He’s not going to be running for anything in the future,” said Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho), who sharply criticized Romney’s comments about Hispanics. “He’s not our standard-bearer, unfortunately.”

Romney adviser Stuart Stevens strongly disagreed, calling Romney “the most popular Republican on the national scene at the moment,” given the votes he received on Election Day. Views of defeated candidates can change dramatically over time, Stevens added.

“Even those who have been critical of the campaign on our side realize in the end that Governor Romney was resonating with millions of Americans and was running the kind of campaign we could all be proud of,” Stevens said. “I think the governor can have the political road of his choosing. I have no idea what that would be.”

The fate of failed presidential nominees varies widely in modern times. Republican nominee and former Senate majority leader Bob Dole still wields influence as a party sage since his failed 1996 run, while Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is still sparring publicly with the man who defeated him in 2008. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who lost to President George W. Bush in 2004, is now a candidate to be Obama’s secretary of defense or state in the second term.

Former vice president Al Gore (D) went into the political wilderness for a time after his 2000 loss to Bush before remaking himself as an antiwar and environmental crusader. The most famous loser of all might be Richard M. Nixon, who was defeated in a presidential bid in 1960 and a California gubernatorial race in 1962, only to come back to win the White House in 1968.

Romney, by contrast, appears well on the way to disappearing, with a not-so-gentle shove from his own party. The private-equity firm founder, who listed his profession as “author” on campaign disclosures, has no political stage from which to operate and few voices of support to spur him on.

It’s possible that the 2012 nominee could be headed for the kind of political ignominy occupied by another former governor and presidential candidate from Massachusetts, Democrat Michael Dukakis, who essentially dropped from sight after his drubbing by George H.W. Bush in 1988.

“There is life after presidential defeat in some cases, but not all,” said Stephen Hess, a presidential historian at the Brookings Institution. “There are still possibilities for service, whether public or otherwise. If you live long enough, there’s often a process of restoration.”

Romney aides and advisers have offered varying explanations for the Nov. 6 election results — which gave Obama 332 electoral votes and about 51 percent of the popular vote — including flawed polling and bungled turnout efforts. But much of the discussion has revolved around Romney’s heavy reliance on older, white voters and his overwhelming losses among blacks, Latinos, young women and other emerging demographic groups.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Romney’s running mate, has pointed to high turnout in “urban areas” as a key factor in the outcome. But Romney, in a post-election call Wednesday with some of his key donors, went further by arguing that young and minority voters supported Obama because of the health-care law, immigration reforms and other “gifts.”

“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” Romney told hundreds of donors on the call, according to a Los Angeles Times account. “In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.”

He added that “it’s a proven political strategy” to “give a bunch of money to a group, and, guess what, they’ll vote for you.”

That theory — which fails to explain how Romney lost whiter and more rural states such as Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Iowa — was quickly condemned as offensive by figures in both parties.

The remarks were reminiscent of Romney’s comments during a Florida fundraiser in May that 47 percent of Americans are government freeloaders who see themselves as “victims” and cannot be persuaded to take personal responsibility for their lives. Romney later disavowed the comments as “completely wrong.”

First-term Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who is calling on his party to tackle immigration reform, said Romney’s latest remarks amount to “blame and disregard” for voters.

“I don’t like the fact that we lost this election; there’s no doubt about that,” Gardner said. “But I’m not going to place the blame for this election on the shoulders of people who didn’t vote for the Republican Party. We need to figure out the reason why we lost the election honestly.”

Craig Shirley, a Ronald Reagan biographer and adviser to conservative groups, said the comments underscore Romney’s fundamental weakness as a nominee. “Conventional wisdom in Republican circles was that Romney was the best candidate,” he said. “In hindsight, he may have been the worst choice.”

Indeed, one of the few people who seems to think Romney should have a future on the national stage is the reelected president, who has said he will seek out his vanquished opponent’s advice on the economy. “There are certain aspects of Governor Romney’s record and his ideas that I think could be very helpful,” Obama said during his first post-election news conference Wednesday.

So far, though, the two haven’t been in touch. “We haven’t scheduled something yet,” Obama said. “I think everybody forgets that the election was only a week ago.”

Dont underestimate the delusional repubs. They will make up a new poll on fox news and repeat it ad naseum. But on the good side the party is so fractured and all over the place....You have mcway way saying "Go right"!!! Its a death sentence. lol